Historiographical Debate Into the Effects of Santa Anna's Reign in Mexico

Santa Anna Dictatorship In his self-described revisionist biography Santa Anna of Mexico (2007), Will Fowler has courageously taken up the defense of the Mexico caudillo, fully aware that he is all but universally reviled in the historiography of the United States and Mexico. From the beginning, he made his intention clear to vindicate the reputation of a dictator whose "vilification has been so thorough and effective that the process of deconstructing the numerous lies that have been told and retold" is almost impossible.[footnoteRef:1] Timothy J.

Henderson asserted that he had a great talent for exploiting and manipulating political divisions but none for governing a country. In U.S. history and popular culture, he has always been portrayed as a corrupt megalomaniac, the 'Napoleon of the West', responsible for the massacres at the Alamo and Goliad.

As John Chasteen and James Wood put it, even his autobiography was an "extraordinary work of self-dramatization" by a dictator who put on a show of being a "vulnerable, introspective protagonist" but was in reality a power-hungry tyrant with "unmitigated vanity" and "obvious self-absorption."[footnoteRef:2] Fowler is not completely successful in redeeming his subject from all the negative historiography surrounding him, especially given Santa Anna's well-deserved reputation for corruption, nepotism and brutality, but he may well be correct that no one else could have done any better in Mexico under the circumstances.

Fowler uses primary sources to disprove some of the most serious charges that Mexican historians have made against Santa Anna, such as that he was bribed to agree to the independence of Texas in 1836, and that even though he was also bribed by President James K.

Polk when he was in exile in Havana in 1846, he nevertheless fought the Mexican War to win as soon as he returned, rather than as a gringo puppet and stooge.[footnoteRef:3] Given the very unfavorable political and economic situation in Mexico in the 1840s, Santa Anna also everything humanly possible to recover Texas and defend the country from a North American invasion. Fowler contends that he was not personally responsible for all the disasters that befell Mexico in this period, but rather the whole system was a failure.

In trying to maintain order and hold the country together against all the centrifugal forces from within and within, he had no other option except to take authoritarian measures that went against his earlier liberal beliefs, but in this he was no different from other Latin American dictators then and later, including Simon Bolivar.[footnoteRef:4] [1: Will Fowler, Santa Anna of Mexico (University of Nebraska Press, 2007), p. x.] [2: "Protagonist on a National Stage" in John Charles Chasteen and James A.

Wood (eds), Problems in Modern Latin American History: Sources and Interpretations (Scholarly Resources, Inc., 2005), p. 99.] [3: Fowler, p. xi.] [4: Fowler, p. 347.] By the time Santa Anna died in Mexico City in 1876, disgraced and impoverished, the nation had had four constitutions in 1824, 1836, 1843 and 1857, was well as two empires in 1822-23 and 1863-67 and a number of dictatorial periods in which Santa Anna figured prominently. Very soon after his death, another caudillo, Porfirio Diaz, would take over the country in the name of Order and Progress and rule until he was overthrown in 1910.

That event would be followed by ten years of revolutions, coups and civil wars that left millions dead and the country destroyed.[footnoteRef:5] During Santa Anna's lifetime, Mexico was involved in four major wars, losing half of its national territory in 1848, and Santa Anna was there fighting in every battle.

Like most Santa Anna biographers and historians, Fowler points out that Vera Cruz was his powerbase and that he was dictator of that strategic province before taking over the rest of the country, as well as its "main provider of employment, produce, and patronage."[footnoteRef:6] He always packed the army with his Vera Cruz clients and allies, as well as the civil administration whenever he was in power.

His strongest natural affinity was not for politics, however, but the army, which he first joined at the age of fourteen, fighting against revolutionaries demanding independence from Spain. Santa Anna was always the type of officer who marched towards the sound of the guns, as Napoleon advised.

Although he lost some major battles like San Jacinto in 1836 and Cerro Gordo in 1847, he also defeated a Spanish invasion in 1829 and a French one in 1838.[footnoteRef:7] Richard Bruce Winders finds that he dominated the years 1821-54 so completely that it could well be "called the Era of Santa Anna," at least before he was completely discredited and removed from power because of the Gadsden Purchase.

Like most members of the Mexican elite, he was reluctant to admit that Texas had been lost forever in 1836 and was still prepared to go to war with President James K. Polk ten years later in opposition to his aggressive expansionist policies.[footnoteRef:8] [5: Fowler, p. 340.] [6: Fowler, p. 350.] [7: Fowler, p. 353.] [8: Richard Bruce Winders, Crisis in the Southwest: The United States, Mexico, and the Struggle over Texas (Scholarly Resources, Inc., 2002), p.

xxxviii.] Fowler defends Santa Anna from the frequent charge that he was a complete opportunist, narcissist and amoral sociopath, who betrayed every friend and ally he ever had, and would expediently adjust his political views to suit the needs of the moment.

He argues that of course "Santa Anna changed sides, but then so did everyone else," and he moved away from his early liberal republicanism and federalism because they had totally failed to bring order and stability to Mexico.[footnoteRef:9] In 1836, he concluded that excessive liberalism and federalism had led to the secession of Texas, and then lost half of the country in 1847-48.[footnoteRef:10] Perhaps these liberal and radical ideas sounded impressive in theory, but in reality he had come to doubt that the Mexican people would have the education and intelligence to organize a liberal or democratic society for at least one hundred years: they were simply not prepared for it and therefore required a strong, paternal hand to guide them.

His career followed a downward trajectory from hope as a young man to despair by the 1850s and 1860s, to the point where he finally supported the French occupation and the Emperor Maximilian as the only hope for saving the country from collapse and a complete takeover by the United States.

He was living in exile by that time, but what he learned about the French occupation turned him back to the liberal camp, although Benito Juarez regarded him as a traitor and his rejected his support and advice.[footnoteRef:11] [9: Fowler, p. 357.] [10: Fowler, p. 358.] [11: Fowler, p. 358.] Lee Stacy describes Santa Anna as an opportunist even in his early career when he forced the Emperor Augustin Iturbide to abdicate in 1823, after initially supporting him.

He supported the conservative government led by Anastasio Bustamonte in 1832, but then backed a liberal coup against him in 1835 when he thought he was too rigidly ideological in his authoritarianism and centralization.[footnoteRef:12] Mark Wasserman argues that Santa Anna was a brilliant politician and the only Mexican leader before Benito Juarez with the skill and determination to hold Mexico together at all.

Like most of Latin America, the nation was badly divided by regionalism, ethnicity and class, and had a tendency to turn toward military strongmen to prevent collapse and disintegration.[footnoteRef:13] By his final term as dictator in 1853-55, Santa Anna had gone so far in the direction of centralization as to take on the trappings of a monarch and insisted on being addressed as Your Serene Highness.

Wasserman also supports the almost universal conclusion among historians that he was as corrupt as the country he ruled, and this has never changed.[footnoteRef:14] [12: Lee Stacy. Mexico and the United States (Marshall Cavendish, 2003), p. 733.] [13: Mark Wasserman, Everyday Life and Politics in Nineteenth Century Mexico: Men, Women, and War (University of New Mexico Press, 2000), p. 20.] [14: Wasserman, p.

14.] Extremely arrogant and vain, Santa Anna had the leg he lost while fighting the French in 1838 buried with full military honors in Mexico City, and was highly offended when a mob dug it up during the 1845 coup and paraded it through the streets.

In his autobiography he protested he would "always be on hand when my country needed me" no matter that he preferred a "life of solitude" but he could not stand how the mob made a spectacle of carrying his led through the streets.[footnoteRef:15] Timothy Henderson found him to be completely amoral and a betrayer of everyone who had ever supported him, but also courageous, charismatic and ruthless when the action started.[footnoteRef:16] His earlier biographer Wilfred Callicott thought that the true key to his character was the training he received as an officer in the Spanish colonial army, "a ruthless and brutal school where fear was the chief taskmaster, where morality and ethics were unknown, and where the end was held to justify the means."[footnoteRef:17] Mary Petite described him as a man of extravagant tastes and outlandish ego, vanity and corruption, who owned a silver chamber pot, a gold-covered saddle and a $7,000 sword -- and enormously expensive item for that time and place.

About the only consistent political conviction he ever showed, as Henderson contended, was extreme hostility to democracy, whether in Mexico or Texas.[footnoteRef:18] [15: "Protagonist on a National Stage," p. 101.] [16: Henderson, p. 77.] [17: Wasserman, p. 18.] [18: Henderson, p. 78.] Santa Anna was the real cause of the Texas War of Independence in 1836, since he abrogated the 1824 constitution when he named himself dictator.

At first the Texans imagined that he would be a liberal and a federalist, unlike the previous regime, and would curb the power of the Church and the aristocracy, but Santa Anna soon disabused them of that notion.[footnoteRef:19] Nor was he even personally courageous in fighting, but instead ran away from the Battle of San Jacinto in disguise as a common soldier.[footnoteRef:20] Oscar Jaquez Martinez does not defend his conduct in the Texas War, either, although he notes that Santa Anna was forced to sign the Treaty of Velasco under duress and the Mexican Congress repudiated it.

Both Texas and the U.S. always insisted that this dubious agreement recognized the independence of Texas with its border and the Rio Grande rather than the Neuces River, but nothing in Santa Anna's subsequent record indicates that he ever accepted this construction of events.[footnoteRef:21] [19: Henderson, p. 75.] [20: Mary Deborah Petite, 1836 Facts about the Texas War of Independence (Perseus Books, 1999), pp. 54-55.] [21: Treaty of Velasco, 1836 in Oscar Jaquez Martinez (ed), U.S.-Mexico Borderlands: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives (Scholarly Resources, Inc., 1996), p.

17.] Santa Anna was decidedly unmerciful in war, particularly toward those he regarded as rebels, traitors and insurgents, and these were the lessons he had learned fighting against the pro-independence movement of Father Miguel Hidalgo as early as 1810. During his dictatorship of 1835-37, he was hardly in the capital at all and in any case day-to-day politics and administration bored him. He preferred to be leading troops in the field, combatting the rebels in Zacatecas and Texas.

As even Fowler concedes, although he had once had the support of the liberals and federalists in Zacatecas, including current and future vice president Gomez Farias, that did not prevent him from taking ruthless measures when they dared to revolt against him. His destruction of the province was so brutal that it left it with a legacy of hatred toward him that never ended.[footnoteRef:22] He also profited personally from taking over the local silver mine and sharing the proceeds with his officers and cronies.

In Texas, according to Timothy Fehrenbach, he ordered all rebels and executed on the spot, including 400 North American prisoners at Goliad.[footnoteRef:23] Santa Anna had already been doing this for decades, and in Texas he was attempting to exterminate the North Americans, yet at San Jacinto his army was defeated in twenty minutes while he was sleeping in his tent. [footnoteRef:24]. [22: Fowler, p. 158.] [23: Timothy R. Fehrenbach, Fire and Blood (De Capo Press, 1995), p. 383.] [24: Fehrenbach, p.

384.] As David Weber notes, the defenders of the Alamo had not expected to die, but rather that they would be relieved in due course by Sam Houston's army. Santa Anna's forces really were not all that superior since he had only 600 troops there on the first day of the battle and 2,400 by the end, but almost all illiterate Indian conscripts who did not even speak Spanish.[footnoteRef:25] Mexican historians from the 1840s onward condemned Santa Anna for running the army based on patronage and corruption rather than ability.

Typically, Santa Anna wrote about the battle in a way that furbished his own image and minimized the losses he suffered, and dismissed the Alamo as an inglorious victory against a weak opponent.[footnoteRef:26] He noted that he gave the Yankees an opportunity to surrender, which was characteristic of Mexican kindness and his own, but they stubbornly refused.

After the Battle of San Jacinto, his many critics assailed him for losing too many troops and the Alamo and being delayed there so long, but he replied that for these armchair strategists it was always "easy enough, from a desk in an office, to pile up charges against a general out in the field."[footnoteRef:27] As for his tendency to devastate the countryside and execute prisoners, Santa Anna explained that the guerillas we constantly harassing his army, and that most of them were not even from Texas but freebooters and filibusters sent by the United States, so he had dealt with them that way.[footnoteRef:28] [25: "Their Decision Irrevocably Sealed their Fate" (1837) in David J.

Weber (ed), Foreigners in their Native Land: Historical Roots of the Mexican-Americans (University of New Mexico Press, 2003), p. 109.] [26: "Their Decision Irrevocably Sealed their Fate," p. 110.] [27: "Their Decision Irrevocably Sealed their Fate," p. 111.] [28: "The Alamo" in William Dirk Raat (ed), Mexico from Independence to Revolution, 1810-1910 (University of Nebraska Press, 1982), p.

90.] Fehrenbach does not blame Santa Anna alone for the defeats that Mexico suffered, since its entire ruling class was corrupt and decadent, dependent on British capital and foreign experts, and had "fed off the material and intellectual capital stored up under the crown, without replenishing either."[footnoteRef:29] Walter Borneman concurred that the chronic problems of Mexico, regardless of who happened to be in charge, were "an empty national treasury, fractious internal friction, a civil war in Yucatan, and continued border strife over Texas."[footnoteRef:30] In Mexico, the real power at that time was in the hands of the army, the Catholic Church and the aristocratic landowners, and no government successfully challenged this oligarchy, nor would Santa Anna even have made the attempt.

He and his supporters certainly believed that that the annexation of Texas was only the opening move of U.S. imperialism, and they were correct that Sam Houston's goal had always been annexation to the United States, but only North-South conflict over adding another slave state prevented this in 1836-45.[footnoteRef:31] [29: Fehrenbach, p. 386.] [30: Walter R. Borneman, Polk: The Man who Transformed the Presidency and America (NY: Random House, 2009), p. 193.] [31: Borneman, p. 194.] When James K.

Polk was elected president of the United States in 1844, Santa Anna was still determined to reconquer Texas, although John Eisenhower claimed that the fractious nature of the Mexican polity and the caudillo's own personal and political flaws ensured that this would not be possible. Gen. Mariano Paredes led a revolt against his and Santa Anna quickly fled to Vera Cruz, almost being killed by Indians along the way before a village priest distracted them by ringing a church bell.

He was arrested and imprisoned in Mexico City, and "beset on all sides by creditors" before being exiled to Havana in June 1845.[footnoteRef:32] John Eisenhower is more charitable towards him than most historians, however, and offered the opinion that "it is difficult to find a man who could have represented the country better than he did, given the state of confusion and poverty."[footnoteRef:33] He agrees with most other Santa Anna scholars that the dictator was greedy, corrupt, opportunistic, and that his Spanish Army training made him a natural conservative authoritarian and royalist.[footnoteRef:34] To finance all his reforms, as well as the army, he levied extensive new taxes on the Catholic Church, industry, merchants and professionals, as well as sales taxes and luxury taxes, which were difficult to collect and increased his unpopularity with the elites.

As usual, he was also charged with massive corruption and embezzlement of state funds, which Fowler regards as his greatest political and moral failing. Nevertheless, he denies that Santa Anna was a natural tyrant or despot, but rather an "arbitrator, a mediator, a guarantor of peace and order."[footnoteRef:35] [32: Eisenhower, p. 7.] [33: Eisenhower, p. 8.] [34: Eisenhower, p. 10.] [35: Fowler, p. 220.] For Fowler, the Santa Anna regime of 1841-45 and his 1843 constitution (Bases Organicas) was about the best and most stable government that Mexico ever had between independence and the rise of Benito Juarez.

Santa Anna favored a centralist republic with a powerful executive, which was necessary to rebuild the army, take back Texas and defend the nation against North American aggression. He allowed for a Senate, but only wealthy merchants, landowners and industrials were permitted to serve in it, and only citizens making over 200 pesos a year were allowed to vote.

In opposition to liberal ideology, Roman Catholicism would also be the official religion of the state.[footnoteRef:36] By European and North American standards of the 19th Century, this definitely situates Santa Anna firmly on the conservative side of the political spectrum, but he never claimed to be a democrat and doubted that the masses yet had the education and capacity to participate in political affairs.

More than any other ruler before Juarez, however, he did take takes to expand public education in Mexico and genuinely believed in free primary schooling for all. In this, he had indeed been consistent from the time when he was governor of Vera Cruz in the 1820s. Santa Anna was also a supporter of land reform, even on his own estates, and regularly provided free farms to landless peasants.[footnoteRef:37] [36: Fowler, p. 217.] [37: Fowler, p.

218.] Fowler maintains that Santa Anna did everything humanly possible to win the war in 1846-47, including mortgaging his own estate and those of his children to obtain 500,000 pesos for the army. This was surely an indication of his sincere nationalism and devotion to the country, as was the fact that he allowed his vice president Gomez Farias and the liberals to rule in Mexico City while he took the field against Zachary Taylor.

Once again, he personally experienced the failure of the liberal-federalist model under the latest constitution, for most states refused to send money or conscripts, and much of his army lacked food, clothing and weapons.[footnoteRef:38] Fowler insists emphatically that Santa Anna was not Polk's Trojan Horse in the Mexican-American War, and that even though he took Yankee bribes while he was in exile in Havana, he repudiated these once he arrived in Vera Cruz in August 1846, saying that "the United States were deceived into believing that I would be capable of betraying my mother country."[footnoteRef:39] Once again, many Mexicans put their faith in him as a military leader and the best battlefield general they were likely to find, no matter that the general was widely distrusted by the liberals.[footnoteRef:40] [38: Fowler, pp.

259-61.] [39: Fowler, p. 255.] [40: Fowler, p. 256.] Fowler asserts that in the wake of the 1848 defeat, Mexico was in danger of falling apart completely, setting the stage for.